A startup creator has spent $69 million on a digital asset tied to a piece of digital artwork by the artist known as “Beeple,” sparking new discussions of what it means to purchase a non-fungible token as this sort of decentralized finance becomes more familiar to investors.
At Coindesk, Jamie Crawley reports that Bitaccess leader Vignesh Sundaresan made the purchase of Beeple’s “Everyday” art piece NFT in order to show that “the global South (is) rising.”
Letting alone what to make of a headline like “Pseudonymous $69M Beeple NFT Buyer MetaKovan Reveals True Identity,” Crawley reports that Sundaresan revealed himself as the user MetaKovan, confirming some earlier conjectures by outside observers that he might be the person in question.
Vignesh Sundaresan’s LinkedIn shows he has an undergraduate’s degree in mechanical engineering, and is has a Masters in Technology innovation management from Carleton University, Ottawa.
With over 5 years of experience working with open technologies, Sundaresan co-founded Bitaccess in 2013.
So what about the “Everyday” NFT? An article at Artnet exemplifies the firestorm that this purchase has created in digital art and decentralized finance circles.
Highlighting the cases for whether this was actually in NFT or not, writer Tim Schneider also seizes on the role of Christie’s auction in helping to facilitate the deal. In a nutshell, some people feel that Christie’s needed to be involved as an authenticator and verifier of the deal, while others felt this violated decentralized finance principles.
“At stake in this ideological clash are the answers to a set of questions equally relevant to the artistic avant-garde and techno-utopianists, particularly as demand for NFTs intensifies to nuclear levels,” Schneider writes. “How many compromises can be made on an ideal before it implodes? Which dilutions (if any) are tolerable for the sake of attracting a larger audience to a potentially transformative cause? And will the answers be decided by any criteria other than who stands to make the most money from wide adoption?”
Thorny questions, to be sure. These and other issues are likely to continue to arise as people put large price tags on NFTs, a highly subjective value proposal.
